Rorschach, 2
RORSCHACH’S DINING ROOM, to the right of the large entrance hall. It’s empty. The room is rectangular, about fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide. On the floor: a thick ash-grey carpet.
On the left-hand wall, painted matt green, hangs a steel-rimmed glass display case containing fifty-four antique coins all bearing the image of Sergius Sulpicius Galba, the prætor who had thirty thousand Lusitanians killed in a single day, but saved his own neck by presenting his children with emotion to the tribunal.
On the back wall, which is done in white gloss paint like the entrance hall, a large watercolour has been put, over a low sideboard; entitled The Rake’s Progress and signed U. N. Owen, it depicts a little railway station in open country. On the left, a railwayman stands leaning against a high desk which serves as a ticket office. He looks about fifty, with his receding hairline, round face, and bushy moustache. He is wearing a waistcoat. He is pretending to look something up in a timetable whilst in fact completing his transcription onto a small rectangular piece of paper of a recipe for mint cake he’s found in an almanac half-hidden by the timetable. In front of him, on the opposite side of the desk, a bespectacled customer whose face expresses a phenomenal degree of exasperation files his fingernails whilst waiting for his ticket: to the right a third character in short sleeves, wearing broad, flower-embroidered braces, is rolling a big drum out of the station. Fields of alfalfa, where cows are grazing, stretch out all around.
On the right-hand wall, which is painted a slightly darker green than the left-hand wall, hang nine plates decorated with representations of:
– a priest giving ashes to a believer
– a man putting a coin into a barrel-shaped savings box
– a woman sitting in the corner of a railway carriage, with her arm in a sling
– two men in clogs, in snowy weather, stamping the ground to warm their feet
– a lawyer pleading a case, looking vehement
– a man in a smoking jacket about to drink a cup of chocolate
– a violinist playing, with a mute attached to his instrument
– a man in a nightgown, holding a candlestick, looking at a spider, symbolising hope, on the wall
– a man holding out his visiting card to another man. Both look aggressive, suggesting a duel
In the middle of the room there is a modern-style round table in citronwood, surrounded by eight chairs upholstered in raised velvet. In the middle of the table there is a silver statuette about ten inches high. It represents a naked, helmeted man on the back of an ox, holding a pyx in his left hand.
The watercolour, the statuette, the antique coins, and the plates, according to Rémi Rorschach, are evidence of his “untiring efforts as a producer”. The statuette, a classic caricatural representation of the minor arcanum called the Knight of Cups, is supposed to have been unearthed during work on that “drama” entitled The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube which we have already had occasion to mention, and which does indeed deal with a murky tale of seeing into the future; the plates are supposed to have been painted specially as background images for the credits of a serial in which the same actor was to have played in succession the roles of a priest, a banker, a woman, a peasant, a lawyer, a good-food-guide writer, a virtuoso, a gullible ironmonger, and an obdurate archduke; the ancient coins – claimed to be genuine – were said to have been given by a collector and admirer of a series of programmes on the Twelve Caesars, though this Sergius Sulpicius Galba has no connection whatever with the Servius Sulpicius Galba whose reign, one and a half centuries later, lasted seven months, between Nero and Othon, before he was slaughtered on the Campus Martius by his own troops, having refused them the donativum.
As for the watercolour, it is, allegedly, simply one of the models for the set of an Anglo-French adaptation in modern dress of Stravinsky’s opera.
It’s hard to be sure how much truth there is in these explanations. Of the four programmes, two were never made: namely, the nine-part serial, turned down by each of the actors approached – Belmondo, Bouise, Bourvil, Cuvelier, Haller, Hirsch, and Maréchal – after they’d read the script; and the updated Rake’s Progress, considered too expensive by the BBC. The series on the Twelve Caesars was made for the schools’ broadcasting service, with which Rorschach was, apparently, unconnected, and similarly The Sixteenth Edge of This Cube seems to have been produced by one of those service companies to which French television so often has recourse.
In fact Rorschach’s television career was conducted exclusively in office-work. Under the vague title of “Project Controller to the Managing Director” or “Test and Research Resources Reorganisation Officer”, his sole function consisted of daily attendance at premeetings, joint meetings, study workshops, management boards, interdisciplinary discussion meetings, general meetings, plenary meetings, reading-panel meetings, and other working parties which, at this level of the hierarchy, make up the main business of life in the French broadcasting organisation, alongside phone calls, conversations in the corridor, business lunches, rush screenings, and trips abroad. There’s no reason not to think he might have put forth the idea of an Anglo-French opera at one of these sessions, or of a history serial based on Suetonius, but it’s more likely he spent his time drawing up or extrapolating from audience surveys, trimming budgets, drafting reports on the utilisation rates of editing studios, dictating memos, and going from meeting room to conference suite, taking care to be at all times indispensable in at least two places at once so that scarcely had he sat down than he would be called to the phone, and have to leave, unavoidably.
Such multifarious activities satisfied Rorschach’s vanity, his taste for power, his talent for plotting and haggling, but they gave no nourishment to his nostalgic desire to be “creative”: in fifteen years, he managed nonetheless to put his name to two productions, both educational serials for export: the first, Doudoune et Mambo, was on French-language teaching for black Africa; the second – Anamous et Pamplenas – used exactly the same scenario, but it aimed “to introduce the pupils of overseas colleges run by the Alliance Française to the beauty and harmony of Greek civilisation”.
In the early seventies, Rorschach got wind of Bartlebooth’s enterprise. At the time, though Bartlebooth had been back for fifteen years, no one really knew the whole story. Those who could have known something about it said little or nothing; others were aware that Madame Hourcade, for instance, had supplied him with boxes, or that he’d had a funny sort of machine set up in Morellet’s room, or, to take another example, that he’d travelled right around the world for twenty years with his servant and that over the twenty years Winckler had received about two parcels a month from all over the world. But no one really knew how these pieces fitted together, and, what’s more, nobody really tried to find out. And Bartlebooth, though he wasn’t unaware that the little secrets which cloaked his existence were the subject of contradictory and often incoherent theories around the building, didn’t ever dream that anyone could come one day and upset his plans.
But Rorschach got keen, and what he heard in fragments about those twenty years of circumnavigation, about the paintings cut in pieces, reassembled, and reseparated, etc., as well as all Winckler’s and Morellet’s stories, gave him the idea of a huge programme in which nothing less than the whole story would be re-enacted.
Bartlebooth said no, obviously. He let Rorschach in for a quarter of an hour and had him shown out. Rorschach persisted, interrogating Smautf and the other servants, grilling Morellet who buried him in increasingly incomprehensible heaps of mumbo jumbo, harassing Winckler who stayed obstinately silent, going out as far as Montargis to talk (pointlessly, for him) to Madame Hourcade, and falling back on Madame Nochère, who didn’t know much but didn’t mind elaborating.
Since there was no law forbidding him to tell a story of a man who did watercolours and jigsaw puzzles, Rorschach decided to go over Bartlebooth’s head, and submitted to Programme Control a proposal for something in between Great Works at Risk and Great Battles of the Past.
Rorschach was too influential in television for his proposal to be turned down. He wasn’t quite influential enough for it to be acted on speedily. Three years later, when Rorschach became so ill as to be forced, in the space of a few weeks, to terminate virtually all professional activity, none of the networks had yet given final approval and the scenario was still incomplete.
Without wishing to anticipate events, it might be useful to point out that Rorschach’s initiative had serious consequences for Bartlebooth. It was by hearing of these televisual misadventures that Beyssandre got wind, last year, of Bartlebooth’s story. And, oddly enough, it was to Rorschach that Bartlebooth came for the name of a director to film the final stage of his enterprise. However, that got him nowhere, except a step deeper into the web of contradictions which he’d known for many years would tie him inexorably tighter.